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Lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature, brought together, without the apology of probability, or even

possibility for their introduction. To make amends, the moral is general and very practical; it is, ‘not to deal in witchcraft and magic

because the devil will have you at last!!’ We are sorry to observe that good talents have been misapplied in the production of this

monster.

(The British Critic 7, June 1796, p. 677)

Morality and monstrosity were two of the hallmarks of eighteenth-century

aesthetic judgement. The lack of the former and abundance of the latter, in the eyes of the reviewer for the British Critic (1796), distinguished M.G.Lewis’s The

Monk as a particularly deserving object of critical vitriol. The review is not extraordinary either in the tone it adopts or in the terms it employs, though The Monk achieved special notoriety. While a few writers, now established as founders of the Gothic tradition—Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe particularly— received both critical and popular approbation, they were in the minority. Between 1790 and 1810 critics were almost univocal in their condemnation of what was seen as an unending torrent of popular trashy novels. Intensified by fears of radicalism and revolution, the challenge to aesthetic values was framed in terms of social transgression: virtue, propriety and domestic order were considered to be under threat.

However, the basis for rejections of Gothic novels had been laid much earlier in the century. The values that gave shape and direction to the Enlightenment, dominated as it was by writings from Greek and Roman culture, privileged forms of cultural or artistic production that attended to the classical rules. Buildings, works of art, gardens, landscapes and written texts had to conform to precepts of uniformity, proportion and order. Aesthetic objects were praised for their harmony and texts were designed to foster appreciation on these terms, to instruct rather than entertain, to inculcate a sense of morality and rational understanding and thus educate readers in the discrimination of virtue and vice. Taste, judgement and value were predicated on ideas of cultivation and civilised

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behaviour that were entwined with social mores of public and domestic duty, harmony and propriety. The dominance of classical values produced a national past that was distinct from the cultivation, rationality and maturity of an enlightened age. This past was called ‘Gothic’, a general and derogatory term for the Middle Ages which conjured up ideas of barbarous customs and practices, of superstition, ignorance, extravagant fancies and natural wildness. Manifestations of the Gothic past—buildings, ruins, songs and romances—were treated as products of uncultivated if not childish minds. But characteristics like extravagance, superstition, fancy and wildness which were initially considered in negative terms became associated, in the course of the eighteenth century, with a more expansive and imaginative potential for aesthetic production.

Gothic productions never completely lost their earlier, negative connotations to become fully assimilated within the bounds of proper literature. Implicated in a major shift in cultural attitudes, Gothic works came to harbour a disturbing ambivalence which disclosed the instability not only of modes of representation but also of the structures that held those representations in place. Throughout the century important social, economic and political as well as cultural changes began to prise apart the bonds linking individuals to an ordered social world. Urbanisation, industrialisation, revolution were the principal signs of change. Enlightenment rationalism displaced religion as the authoritative mode of explaining the universe and altered conceptions of the relations between individuals and natural, supernatural and social worlds. Gothic works and their disturbing ambivalence can thus be seen as effects of fear and anxiety, as attempts to account for or deal with the uncertainty of these shifts. They are also attempts to explain what the Enlightenment left unexplained, efforts to reconstruct the divine mysteries that reason had begun to dismantle, to recuperate pasts and histories that offered a permanence and unity in excess of the limits of rational and moral order. In this respect the past that was labelled Gothic was a site of struggle between enlightened forces of progress and more conservative impulses to retain continuity. The contest for a coherent and stable account of the past, however, produced an ambivalence that was not resolved. The complex and often contradictory attempts either to make the past barbaric in contrast to an enlightened present or to find in it a continuity that gave English culture a stable history had the effect of bringing to the fore and transforming the way in which both past and present depended on modes of representation.

The various developments in aesthetic practice that paved the way for Gothic fiction are themselves accompanied by similar concerns about the nature and effects of representation. Romances, the tales of magical occurrences and exotic adventures that drew on the customs and superstitions of the Middle Ages, met, from the late seventeeth century on, with general disapproval. Graveyard poetry, rejecting human vices and vanities through an insistence on mortality, encouraged an interest in ruins, tombs and nocturnal gloom as the frontiers that opened on to an afterlife of infinite bliss. The taste for the sublime that dominated eighteenth-century aesthetic enquiries also offered intimations of an

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infinity beyond the limits of any rational framework. Natural and artistic objects were seen to evoke emotional effects like terror and wonder which marked an indistinct sense of an immensity that exceeded human comprehension and elevated human sensibility. The effusive and imaginative descriptions of objects both natural and supernatural that were recovered by scholars collecting the songs and ballads of medieval culture provided the examples of a romantic and sublime way of writing. Similarly, medieval architecture, with its cathedrals, castles and ruins, became a worthy model for evocations of sublimity.

The Gothic novel owes much to these developments. The marvellous incidents and chivalric customs of romances, the descriptions of wild and elemental natural settings, the gloom of the graveyard and ruin, the scale and permanence of the architecture, the terror and wonder of the sublime, all become important features of the eighteenth-century Gothic novel. Similarly, the emphasis on the limits of the neoclassical aesthetic project that occurs in reappraisals of romances, ruins and sublimity provides an important stimulus to the imaginative aspirations of Gothic fiction.

ROMANCE AND NOVEL

In discussions of eighteenth-century fiction, the term ‘Gothic romance’ is more applicable than ‘Gothic novel’ as it highlights the link between medieval romances, the romantic narratives of love, chivalry and adventure, that were imported from France from the late seventeenth century onwards, and the tales that in the later eighteenth century were classified as ‘Gothic’. Neo-classical criticism throughout the eighteenth century found much to disapprove of, often without any attempt at discrimination, in novels and romances. Works of fiction were subjected to general condemnation as wildly fanciful pieces of folly that

served no useful or moral purpose.

In a review of Smollett’s Peregrine Pickle (1751), one critic, John Cleland, complained:

Serious and useful works are scarce read, and hardly any thing of morality goes down, unless ticketed with the label of amusement. Hence that flood of novels, tales, romances, and other monsters of the imagination, which

have been either wretchedly translated, or even more unhappily imitated, from the French, whose literary levity we have not been ashamed to adopt,

and to encourage the propagation of so depraved a taste.

Instead, the precepts of classical writers like Horace and Plutarch are recommended. Writing from life is considered the morally instructive way to ward off ‘monsters of the imagination’, providing guidance in the ways of the world rather than extravagant excursions of the imagination:

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For as the matter of them is taken chiefly from nature, from adventures, real or imaginary, but familiar, practical and probable to be met with in the course of common life, they may serve as pilot’s charts, or maps of those parts of the world, which every one may chance to travel through; and in this light they are public benefits. Whereas romances and novels which turn upon characters out of nature, monsters of perfection, feats of chivalry, fairy-enchantments, and the whole train of the marvellously absurd, transport the reader unprofitably into the clouds, where he is sure to find no solid footing, or into those wilds of fancy, which go for ever out of the way of all human paths.

It was not only the failure to attend to rules of imitation that proved to be an object of critical concern. The straying of fancy from the paths of nature demonstrated more than a depraved taste: it was also believed to exert a

corrupting influence on the morals of readers. Complaining at the ‘deluge of familiar romances’, T.Row observed in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1767): ‘Tis

not only a most unprofitable way of spending time, but extremely predjudicial to their morals, many a young person being entirely corrupted by the giddy and fantastical notions of love and gallantry, imbibed from thence’. Indeed, the danger of moral degeneration became the principal reason for the general condemnation of romances, tales and novels.

Despite the prevailing indiscriminate dismissal of romances and novels, attempts were made to distinguish between modes of fictional writing and to admit a few examples of the latter within the parameters of acceptability. James

Beattie’s ‘On Fable and Romance’ (1783) draws clear distinctions between medieval romances and novels. The essay argues that Cervantes’ Don Quixote

signals the end of the old or medieval romance and the emergence of the modern romance or novel: ‘Fiction henceforth divested herself of her gigantick size, tremendous aspect, and frantick demeanour; and, descending to the level of common life, conversed with man as his equal, and as a polite and cheerful companion.’ From Cervantes, writers learnt ‘to avoid extravagance, and imitate nature’ by adhering to rules of probability (Williams, p. 320). Novels are divided into serious and comic forms. Included, with some approval, in these categories are works by writers who are now regarded as the core of the eighteenth-century novel tradition: Defoe, Richardson, Fielding and Smollett. However, Beattie’s essay concludes on a cautionary and, by 1783, a conventional note, describing romances as ‘a dangerous recreation’ of which a few ‘may be friendly to good taste and good morals’ while the majority ‘tend to corrupt the heart, and stimulate the passions’. ‘A habit of reading them’, Beattie goes on, ‘breeds a dislike to history, and all the substantial parts of knowledge; withdraws the attention from nature, and truth; and fills the mind with extravagant thoughts, and too often with criminal propensities’ (Williams, p. 327). Beattie’s warning about romances echoes the distinctions that grounded eighteenth-century criticism: in the maintenance of morality, propriety and virtue, truth, reason,

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knowledge and taste should always be elevated above fiction, passion, ignorance and depravity.

In The Rambler (1750), Samuel Johnson differentiated between romances and novels in similar terms. But he was also keen to stress the moral usefulness of the latter. Romances were described as wildly extravagant and fanciful tales of knights, giants, fabulous entities and marvellous incidents. Novels were privileged as instructive observations on the living world. It was, however, more than accurate imitation of nature or polite society that separated good writing from bad. For Johnson, the ‘familiar histories’ offered by novels possessed the capacity to educate readers, to convey with greater efficiency a knowledge of virtue and vice. The realism of novels, moreover, was required to be selective: imitations of nature and life were to be chosen on the basis of their propriety and not be coloured by passion or wickedness. Novels ought to highlight virtue and

elicit a reader’s abhorrence at depictions of vice. The reason for the representation of vice is made clear in lines from Pope’s Essay on Man: ‘Vice is

a monster of so frightful mien/As, to be hated, needs but to be seen’ (II, 217–18). Representations of vice as a monster conformed to an important strategy in that it defined the limits of propriety. The term monster also applied in aesthetic judgements to works that were unnatural and deformed, that deviated either from the regularity attributed to life and nature or from the symmetry and proportion valued in any form of representation. Thus it was less a matter of concern that monsters were represented and more a question of the manner in which they were represented and of the effects of those representations. Romances were easily categorised as examples of childish fancy, trivial and incredible tales of ignorance and superstition. Their effects on readers, however, were of major concern. In encouraging readers’ credulity and imagination, and in blurring the boundaries between supernatural and illusory dimensions and natural and real worlds, romances loosened the moral and rational structures that ordered everyday life. By displaying monsters in too attractive a light, vice rather than virtue might be promoted. For, if fiction, as Johnson maintained, should establish and reproduce moral and proper ideas of conduct, it could also become a manual

of misconduct.

Fiction was thus recognised as a powerful but ambivalent form of social education. The insistence on distinctions between romances and novels forms part of a wider process of teaching readers proper moral and rational understanding. Distinguishing between good and bad modes of writing was more than a merely aesthetic enterprise: it marked an attempt to supplement an assumed inability on the part of romances and their growing readership to discriminate between virtue and vice, and thus to forestall their seduction along fictional paths that stimulated antisocial passions and corrupt behaviour. That these boundaries were difficult to police accounts for the repeated critical effort to maintain them. Even the clear classifications proposed by Beattie and Johnson fell foul of the way in which their terms were framed. Beattie’s essay on medieval romances and the novel form describes another type as a ‘strange

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mixture’ of the two. As examples, Beattie cites texts by the late seventeenthcentury French writer Madeleine de Scudery which he goes on to describe:

In them, all facts and characters, real and fabulous; and systems of policy and manners, the Greek, the Roman, the Feudal, and the modern, are jumbled together and confounded: as if a painter should represent Julius Cesar drinking tea with Queen Elizabeth, Jupiter, and Dulcinea del Toboso, and having on his head the laurel wreathe of antient Rome, a suit of Gothick armour on his shoulders, laced ruffles at his wrist, a pipe of tobacco In his mouth, and a pistol and tomahawk stuck in his belt.

(Williams, p. 320)

The diversity of events, styles, settings and characters composing this strange assemblage engages in an extravagant refusal to respect boundaries of fact and fiction and reproduce imitations of nature and life. As a result they are rejected as ‘intolerably tedious’ and ‘unspeakably absurd’. These romances, however, are the fore-runners of the strange mixture of forms that appeared as Gothic tales later in the century. Indeed, while at Eton, Horace Walpole described the effects

of his predilection for romances in a letter to George Montagu (6 May 1736): ‘As I got farther into Virgil and Clelia, I found myself transported from Arcadia, to the garden of Italy, and saw Windsor Castle in no other view than the capitoli immobile saxum’

The word ‘romance’ had come to signify more recent productions as well as medieval narratives. Charlotte Lennox’s novel The Female Quixote (1752)

satirises romance reading by presenting a heroine who interprets every event as though it were part of some great romantic adventure. Despite critical and novelistic attempts to sustain distinctions, fiction continued to upset conventions of reading and codes of behaviour. Even forceful attempts, like Johnson’s, to

mark out the useful and moral from the wasteful and corrupting potential of fiction encountered the destabilising pleasures of writing. In her The Progress of Romance (1785), Clara Reeve, herself a writer of Gothic and historical romances,

outlined in very Johnsonian terms a definition of romance and novel while acknowledging the seductive power of fiction:

The Romance is an heroic fable, which treats of fabulous persons and things. —The Novel is a picture of real life and manners, and of the times in which it is written. The Romance in lofty and elevated language, describes what never happened or is likely to happen. —The Novel gives a familiar relation of such things, as pass every day before our eyes, such as may happen to our friend, or to ourselves; and the perfection of it, is to represent every scene, in so easy and natural a manner, and to make them appear so probable, as to deceive us into a persuasion (at least while we are reading) that all is real, until we are affected by the joys or distresses, of the persons in the story, as if they were our own.

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(I, p. 111)

In deceiving readers with persuasively real representations of events and characters, novels work in an opposite manner to romances. The concern about the effects of fiction becomes paramount in eighteenth-century criticism. That these are representations is not at issue. What is more important are the values that are reproduced as natural or real rather than the actual form of nature or everyday life. Fiction becomes distinctly, though ambivalently, ideological. Able to reproduce a set of dominant ideas about the relationship of individuals to their social and natural world, all narratives were acknowledged, if only at times tacitly, to possess the capacity to order or subvert manners, morals and perceptions.

In the response to Gothic architecture, too, the operations of enlightenment ideology are apparent. Privileging uniformity and proportion over scale and extravagance, eighteenth-century critics classified any deviations from

symmetrical structure as the deformities exhibited by the absence of taste of a barbaric age. Neve’s Complete Builder’s Guide (1703) dismisses medieval

edifices as ‘massive, cumbersome and unwieldy’. In contrast Elizabethan imitations of Gothic structure were characterised by their ‘affected lighteness, Delicacy, and over-rich, even whimsical Decorations’ (Clark, pp. 50–1). As in criticism of romances, chronological differences tended to be elided so any constructions that were wastefully over-ornamented or unwielding and cumbersome were described as Gothic. Comparisons between Gothic and classical architecture served only to display the superiority of the latter. Joseph Addison, for example, praised the great and amazing form of the Pantheon in Rome and contrasted it with the meanness he found in Gothic cathedrals. Alexander Gerard, in his Essay on Taste (1764), denied Gothic structures any

claim to beauty because they lacked proportion and simplicity (Monk, pp. 34–5). Lord Kames, in his Elements of Criticism (1762), clearly states prevailing

attitudes towards beautiful form: ‘Viewing any body as a whole, the beauty of its figure arises from regularity and simplicity; viewing the parts in relation to each other, uniformity, proportion and order, contribute to its beauty’ (p. 85).

The insistence on neoclassical rules of composition manifests the importance attached to the manner in which eighteenth-century culture constructed and reproduced its own idea of itself. Architecture told the story of its development and represented its values; it was interpreted accordingly. Some of Kames’s apparently inconsequential speculations on the appropriate architectural style of ruins indicate a certain investment in distancing the enlightened present from a Gothic past: ‘Whether should a ruin be in the Gothic or Grecian form? In the former, I think; because it exhibits the triumph of time over strength; a melancholy but not unpleasant thought: a Grecian ruin suggests rather the triumph of barbarity over taste; a gloomy and discouraging thought’ (p. 430). This somewhat fastidious way of accounting for the appropriate taste displays a serious effort to privilege classical cultivation over the barbarity of the past. Any